decided that every team should leave a record of its visit on the cabin
walls. GETTING TO THE CORE IN 2004, reads one inscription, drawn in magic
marker. Others include:
THE CRAB CREW: CLAWS FOR A CAUSE— 2005
CORAL SEX— 2008
THE FLUORESCENCE TEAM— 2009
The American-Israeli team that was in residence at the time of my
arrival had already made two trips to the island. The epigram from its first
visit, DROPPING ACID ON CORALS, was accompanied by a sketch of a syringe
dripping what looked like blood onto a globe. The group’s latest message
referred to its study site, a patch of coral known as DK-13. DK-13 lies out
on the reef, far enough away from the station that, for the purposes of
communication, it might as well be on the moon.
The writing on the wall said, DK-13: NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM.
THE first European to encounter the Great Barrier Reef was Captain
James Cook. In the spring of 1770, Cook was sailing along the east coast of
Australia when his ship, the Endeavour, rammed into a section of the reef
about thirty miles southeast of what is now, not coincidentally,
Cooktown. Everything dispensable, including the ship’s cannon, was
tossed overboard, and the leaky Endeavour managed to creak ashore,
where the crew spent the next two months repairing its hull. Cook was
flummoxed by what he described as “a wall of Coral Rock rising all most
perpendicular out of the unfathomable Ocean.” He understood that the
reef was biological in origin, that it had been “formed in the Sea by
animals.” But how, then, he would later ask, had it come to be “thrown up
to such a height?”
The question of how coral reefs arose was still an open one sixty years
later, when Lyell sat down to write the Principles. Although he had never
seen a reef, Lyell was fascinated by them, and he devoted part of volume
two to speculating about their origins. Lyell’s theory—that reefs grew